0000000000466793

AUTHOR

Emily Carrington

Ocean acidification bends the mermaid's wineglass

Ocean acidification lowers the saturation state of calcium carbonate, decreasing net calcification and compromising the skeletons of organisms such as corals, molluscs and algae. These calcified structures can protect organisms from predation and improve access to light, nutrients and dispersive currents. While some species (such as urchins, corals and mussels) survive with decreased calcification, they can suffer from inferior mechanical performance. Here, we used cantilever beam theory to test the hypothesis that decreased calcification would impair the mechanical performance of the green alga Acetabularia acetabulum along a CO 2 gradient created by volcanic seeps off Vulcano, Italy. Cal…

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The aquaculture supply chain in the time of covid-19 pandemic: Vulnerability, resilience, solutions and priorities at the global scale

13 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures

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Mussels as a model system for integrative ecomechanics.

Copyright © 2015 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. Mussels form dense aggregations that dominate temperate rocky shores, and they are key aquaculture species worldwide. Coastal environments are dynamic across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, and their changing abiotic conditions affect mussel populations in a variety of ways, including altering their investments in structures, physiological processes, growth, and reproduction. Here, we describe four categories of ecomechanical models (biochemical, mechanical, energetic, and population) that we have developed to describe specific aspects of mussel biology, ranging from byssal attachment to energetics, population growth, an…

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The Synergistic Impacts of Anthropogenic Stressors and COVID-19 on Aquaculture: A Current Global Perspective

13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables.-- This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License

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Symposium on “Climate Change and Molluscan Ecophysiology” at the 79thAnnual Meeting of the American Malacological Society

Climate change has already had many observable effects on Earth. On land, glaciers and snowpacks have shrunk, tropical forests are being replaced by savannahs, and coastal areas have increased risks of flooding (e.g., IPCC 2007, Allan and Soden 2008, Dai 2010, NOAA 2010, Chen et al. 2011). In addition to sea-surface warming, climate change has altered the physical and chemical nature of the marine environment, including ocean acidification and expanding hypoxia. The scope and scale of future environmental change that individuals will undergo on land and in the sea will fundamentally influence the ecological and evolutionary responses of populations and species, dependent on their evolved ph…

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Estimation of fitness from energetics and life-history data: An example using mussels.

Changing environments have the potential to alter the fitness of organisms through effects on components of fitness such as energy acquisition, metabolic cost, growth rate, survivorship, and reproductive output. Organisms, on the other hand, can alter aspects of their physiology and life histories through phenotypic plasticity as well as through genetic change in populations (selection). Researchers examining the effects of environmental variables frequently concentrate on individual components of fitness, although methods exist to combine these into a population level estimate of average fitness, as the per capita rate of population growth for a set of identical individuals with a particul…

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